I lived in South Asia for a while and the thing that would strike me is the everyday catastrophes. For instance, there was a recent Indian derailment that you barely heard about here in the US https://apnews.com/article/india-passenger-train-derail-dead...
275 deaths.
It was only covered in the NYT, LAT, WaPo, Chicago Tribune, WSJ, USAT, NPR, CNN, MSNBC, ABC News, NBC News, and CBS News....just to name a few.
But there's also the concern of frequency, [2] occurs more frequent than [1], people generally don't care about the people at [2] because they are "unimportant", and not prominent.
The point being made is about misallocation of resources, not news coverage. (Novel stories will always grab more attention.)
Who?
The US Navy/Coast Guard sending an ultra deepwater ROV isn't even comparable to the Greeks actively monitoring the boat enough to take a photo of it before it capsized, let alone is anyone mobilizing "entire nation states"
what resources? were US and canada supposed to ship deep sea ROVs over to the Mediterranean to help refugees?
even if you wanted the US/Canada to help, it wouldn't have been the north atlantic coast guards doing it.
The families of the missing rich people have the resources to fund the search. The families of the missing people in the Mediterranean obviously do not.
Do you have a detailed list of rescue vehicles deployed for each event ?
I don't know. Do you ?
From wikipedia: "Immediately following the sinking, the Greek Coast Guard and the military initiated a massive search and rescue operation."
the US and Canadian coast guards don't operate in the Mediterranean, and (presumably) couldn't have gotten ships there fast enough to do anything about it, anyways.
It wouldn't be surprising that some of those rescue ships were funded by the families of the victims, considering the size of their bank accounts.
But the contrast is still striking between both the situations and media reporting of 5 rich men vs 700 of some of the world’s poorest and most desperate people.
Both are unbelievably tragic.
The reporting on the Mediterranean disaster seems to have gone a lot quieter than I would have expected given what we now know about how the Greek authorities story simply does not match up with what actually seems to have happened. (It seems like there may have been an opportunity to prevent that disaster).
There is no way in hell I would pay $250k to board a janky-ass sub going deep into the ocean.
For $250k, I could buy a nice house for me, my girlfriend and our future family.
And even that is not possible yet. Because I don’t have that kind of money.
There's a reason migrants take the Mediterranean route, instead of the Atlantic route.
Why? As a Minnesotan, the first thing I'm doing is hopping on my boat and heading north to Canada.
A lot of the Central American refugees are fleeing very sharp increases in gang violence.
Fukushima a) happened and b) Japan and the world are still there
When China, Western Europe, or the US collapses into civil war refugees from those countries do indeed migrate. The problem is other countries start collapsing as well because they were dependent on some form of trade with those regions. As a result its unlikely there will ever be a large scale exodus of people from the US. We'll all just be survivors in the wasteland at that point.
That's not even enough of down payment for a tear down where I live!
Similar stories like the Thai boys trapped in the cave, or the Chilean miners, had a similar effect.
A bit like "Snakes on a plane". Again, trapped with your phobias.
But they didn't go to watch a shipwreck sunken long ago for some entertainment. They tried to cross over to Europe out of desperation for a better life. Much better to fill the news cycle with the rich dudes.
But hey, we in the West are fine not worrying too much about some poor folks Africa dying at our door steps. Because doing so, would force us to face the fact that we are by no means as morally superior than we like to think, and just convinced ourselves to be with all the help Ukrainian refugees got. So, we prefer not to think about it, as a society.
Everyone is screaming, death is all around you. People are drowning, and in their drowning flailing limbs they are pulling others to their deaths.
[Edited to add: The migrants would've had time to process what was happening to them. There would be many long minutes of terror, suffocation, as they died. Hundreds. Women, children.]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5_A8dq2fA5o
A friend of mine was involved with computer forensics on recovered cellphones on this one. Just awful.
Local news trumps global.
I am sure in Greece the Messenia migrant boat disaster got more coverage than Titan.
That said, the big factor is how sadly common migrant boat disasters are (just like liquid gas exploding in a restaurant in China and killing 10+ people, happened yesterday).
Carbon fiber submersible on the way to Titanic containing cocky inventor, plus billionaire, plus kid hits so many spots for news cycle.
My opinion is the complete opposite, I think it has more coverage because it's a feel good event for 90% of the world who absolutely despise rich fucks in that specific part of the dumb X rich venn diagram
I haven't seen a single post about how sad the sub story is... it's all memes and people amazed at how stupid humans can be
Someone who took the trip before said they had to sign a waver which mentioned death multiple times. It's like climbing Everest, walking to the north pole, commercial space flights, base jumping etc.
The med disaster was people embarking on a dangerous "adventure" out of what they perceived as being a necessity.
Of course all lives should be regarded as being equal.
They died close to the shipwreck. Maybe the Titanic site will slowly fill up with corpses, just like Everest is doing.
> Of course all lives should be regarded as being equal.
Lives sure. But not deaths. Bringing yourself in a confirmed dangerous situation just for the thrill of it, even being so desperate for it as to pay what post people would dream of earning over multiple years, and then dying during this adventure ... in contrast to desperate refugees trying to escape into a better life and then dying because traffickers don't care about their survival.. Idk man, doesn't sound equal to me.
Now people _pay_ to be carried on the Everest, pay for a ticket to space, pay for a ticket to the titanic, &c. There is nothing left so they fight for the crumbs, looking for the next dumbest idea on the list
Some even had brand new boots, which anyone with half a brain knows is a bad idea. A few did turn out to be tough bastards though, spending several days up there alone in a state of delirium and eventually making it back down on their own accord.
Guardian also mentioned a Mexican Youtuber having taken the trip down to the Titanic in that titanium coffin, just for clicks & views.
Just nitpicking here but this is quite normal. Any somewhat physically involved commercially offered activity has waivers to sign that mention potential death and that absolve the business from responsibility. Gyms for example do this.
I thought to have read the boat capsized while being towed, as claimed by one of the survivors. Being towed could be an involuntary act, while throwing a line seems solely meant to help.
> The 104 survivors of the tragedy have very limited mobility and access to communications. Some of them said Greek Coast Guard vessels threw them a line shortly before their vessel capsized [1]
On a personal note. I myself got once rescued by the navy with their Zodiac. That was a mutually fantastic experience. I believe that coastguards anywhere would prefer to rescue above anything else, that is what they signed up for. I hope this dual tragedy will help the leadership to remove anything that creeps between that objective.
[1] https://english.elpais.com/international/2023-06-20/greece-i...
And from what I’ve read about, the U.S Coast Guard are awesome folks that’ll trip over each other to save anyone if they can..
We (I say this not from my point of view) don't want to see poor people.
We don't relate to them and we think they should just be successful in their countries.
In contrast there is someone who is part of us, not poor, has achieved something and entertained us in an interesting way.
Of course we will try to help them and not those refugees.
The mental issue of us living great while 3th world countries exist is nothing new for a long time.
It's now even so old that there is research done on how to help people because the obvious things didn't work.
Can you imagine having to decide to do such a risky thing? They know they risk their life doing so. Which is on top of having to leave your family, friends and the place you probably love to eventually probably find a shitty job and having to be subjected to a lot of difficulties, administrative non-sense, and everything else.
Maybe the EU has its fair share of responsibility in the causes pushing people migrating "illegally" too.
Migrants are not the issue. The system that forces them to migrate is.
Occasionally we can see here on HN stories about lost sailors being rescued after weeks lost in the water, or shipwrecked on some remote rock. The common theme for those stories is that there wasn't a bunch of ships that went looking for them for weeks. For every person who survived such event, many more died.
When there is a lot of media coverage you also tend to get more reaction by officials, which then generate even more media coverage. It is the same concept why a individual can create a story on HN and reach people at google/facebook/apple, while thousands of users can have an identical situation and never reach a single person from support. It not a fair system but its a very well understood phenomenon.
The response on sending rescue teams was high even before it got popular on the news. I remember reading some statements that "we sent everything we can" in the very first news.
The problem is that there's no immediate feedback when they go missing so the search areas are pointlessly large to even attempt SAR operations. Areas where there's lots of immigration traffic are always monitored, like the Greeks were monitoring the boat before it capsized (enough to get that aerial photo of the overcrowded decks).
The vast majority of Coast Guards aren't stretched to their limits, they're sitting there ready to launch SAR operations if anyone calls, all largely operating for free as a cheap way of supporting maritime trade. The USCG alone responds to tens of thousands of cases a year, rescuing thousands of people. Some corrupt nations skimp on their CGs but that wasn't really the case here.
The Titan was A, your average fishing boat or other vessel is B. And all those migrants are, and that pisses me off to an incredible degree, C.
But you don't use resources to help people who are forced to leave their country and now are drowning in the sea.
The average human can't tread that long without a life jacket, the average is ~2-3 hours and that's in still water (to be a lifeguard you have to last 30 minutes), not a choppy ocean/sea. By the time any country other than Italy or Greece came to the location, they'd already be dead. It's tragic, but there is no discrepancy. If there were a chance of actual survival for days, there would have been a much larger response.
Also, apparently the Greeks offered aid before the boat even sank and the boat declined because they didn't want to go to Greece, they wanted to go to Italy. There are mixed reports on that though as now some are blaming the Greek coast guard for tipping the boat over by accident.
If you want something to be upset about, be upset about practically every country on Earth's broken immigration systems that cause these tragic events.
And some lights to try if it gets dark.
Regarding the US Navy, well, they do have a Fleet in the Mediterranean, it's not like they had to sail all the way from Pearl Harbour.
Also, what people also forget, the Mediterranean is under almost comlkete surveillance. So no big surprise if a vessel goes down, most of the time authorities knew of said vessel before.
That’s not in any way to detract from the tragedy, just pointing out one reason why it’s barely covered.
Once something becomes common, it’s not news anymore.
In the case of the sub, there where a chance to find them alive. This makes the story more compelling.
The average person here might think they are, but they'd be deluding themselves.
I'm never the first one to start whining about refugee related disasters but hundreds of women & children drowning on a boat after having been in a miserable state for days on end is just the worst. Other boats had been circling it for days and apart from providing some food & water nothing was done. Maybe an attempt to tow it, which could well have led to the capsizing.
How could such a ship have been rescued? Any attempt at evacuation would have probably led to a capsizing anyway due to people moving around in a panic, unless ... the boat was wedged between two strong boats?
Mysterious cases always get more traction on social media too. There was an instance in the UK where a woman went missing near a river. People were speculating for weeks about what had happened. They would travel to the location and try and be detectives. It's was insane. People said it was because she was a white woman, but I don't think it's that. It's just the mystery of not knowing what happened and a body not being found straight away after divers searched the area. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Nicola_Bulley
Same goes for the sub. It's not because it was full of billionaires. It was because it was from a company infamous for cutting corners and people wanting confirmation that it did in fact implode. It also just boggles the mind why people who are so wealthy would get in something so shoddily put together. They have the money to fund a whole expedition like James Cameron did, but they'd rather increase the risk of death by an order of magnitude.
People can't survive for long in cold seas. By the time a migrant boat disaster makes the news, hopes of finding survivors may already have faded.
I watched one video that complained about off the shelf parts being used, but the two examples was an RV light (not safety related) and the gaming controller (which they had multiple back ups).
They also claimed to have been reviewed by Boeing and University of Washington. There was 7 different mechanisms that could force a return. Some of those were purely mechanical.
Clearly the sub wasn’t safe enough, but I’m not seeing anything that makes it obviously badly built.
https://twitter.com/LadyDoctorSays/status/167170098942929715...
The issue as far as I have read is that the hull was made of carbon fibre. There hasn't been any submersible that has reached those depths before made of that material. The effect continued pressurization/depressurization had on the carbon fibre wasn't understood. Composite materials are so much more complicated to model and understand. There was no non-destructive testing to see what effect the repeated cycles had on the hull, no way of knowing whether cracks could form beneath the surface. The failure mode at depth is catastrophic, there's no room for error. Someone pointed all this out to them and was fired https://newrepublic.com/post/173802/missing-titanic-sub-face....
https://edition.cnn.com/2023/06/21/us/titan-sub-safety-ocean...
In response to them knowing the sub wasn't fit for purpose they opted to install a "real time health monitoring system" which acoustically checked the integrity of the hull. But it's pointless. By the time any acoustic monitoring system picked something up it would be too late, because carbon fibre just shatters into a million pieces. It's not like Steel where it can gradually fatigue, it's crack BOOM dead.
Using carbon fibre for the hull is like rolling your own crypto. Maybe you can get it to work but unless you properly scrutinize it there is most likely fundamental flaws in your implementation and it's just better to use tried and true methods. In the sub world that tried and true method is just thick steel.
I wonder if this event will cause some changes, or if it is an expensive step in figuring out how to properly test this material.
No. Not really. It's a horrible idea. It's irresponsible. It's negligent.
Consumer grade components are not designed for the kind of reliability and failure tolerance requirements these kinds of applications have to face every mission. A simple example of this would be no conformal coating anywhere to prevent failures due to condensation on the circuit board. Also, tin whiskers due to RoHS solder. No redundancy or failure tolerance in any portion of the design. It isn't enough to say "we have extra game controllers". That's not how you build reliable failure-tolerant systems where people's lives depend on things working perfectly 99.9999% of the time.
Also, it is a fallacy to say that millions of people use these controllers. The most obvious problem with this statement is that we have zero data on failure rates and failure modes. And, of course, nobody dies. As a parallel example, you would be hard-pressed to find toy controllers on medical equipment, even in situations where there might be time to deal with failures.
> the hull was made of carbon fibre <snip> In the sub world that tried and true method is just thick steel.
Yup. Fundamental principle: Carbon fiber is best used under tension, not compression. Not a good choice for a life-support compartment under incredible external pressure. One way I think of it is: In compression you are mostly relying on the epoxy to keep things together. Without epoxy carbon fiber will support as much compression as a common string. Zero.
The carbon fiber seems to be the critical nail in the coffin.
That's what it sounds like.
> The carbon fiber seems to be the critical nail in the coffin.
If the CF vessel failed it would have instantaneous and violent beyond comprehension. What little reliable info is out there seems to indicate that's what happened.
A lot of this is bewilderment at the choice of carbon fibre for the pressure vessel, which is sensitive to impact damage and wear from repeated load cycles, damage is hard to diagnose, and as it's very brittle, prone to catastrophic failure. It's not commonly used for this sort of application, and there may not be good data on (1) when it would eventually fail and (2) whether you'd be able to tell before use.
As I understand, the choice was motivated by wanting the sub to have the large interior space necessary to bring along that many passengers. Deepsea subs usually don't attempt that either.
All more or less untested and uncertified. Throw in the reported comms issues that were common during past operations, a highly inexperienced engineering team, a culture promoting unsafe practices and you get a death trap of a vessel.
I think there was a fair bit of other concerns. I thought this video was informative and the kind of thing the HN crowd would appreciate, so take a look.
These design flaws weren't an unfortunate mistake, they were part of a very deliberate pattern that went predictably wrong.
Some highlights include:
* Design inspired by the "DeepFlight Challenger" - but DeepFlight said their craft was only rated for one dive, and weakens with each cycle, and could not be used for five dives.
* Hull designed by subcontract manufacturer in 6 weeks - scarcely enough time to do much testing.
* In an early dive the CEO performed solo, lost contact with the surface ship for approximately one hour
* While diving with a journalist, lost contact with the support vessel for 5 hours.
* It was impossible to open the sub from inside (admittedly, this is only relevant if you first manage to ascend to the surface)
* Hull started showing showing signs of cyclic fatigue in January 2020 (they got it repaired)
* Assembly and testing procedures so sloppy they managed to attempt a dive with a thruster installed the wrong way around.
* Employee called for a stronger front window, and nondestructive testing of the hull. Company fired him and sued him.
* CEO on record as saying ship safety laws "needlessly prioritized passenger safety over commercial innovation" and that "At some point, safety just is pure waste. I mean, if you just want to be safe, don't get out of bed."
* Couldn't get certified by a ship classification society, claimed that was OK because most marine accidents are operator error not mechanical failure; and the standards didn't give them adequate credit for their corporate culture of safety.
The other thing that indicates it was a deathtrap is the deaths.
With that said, personally I support the right of people to expose themselves to the risk of death in search of adventure. Normal folks can buy motorbikes and quadbikes, millionaires can buy cessnas, why shouldn't billionaires have deadly entertainment options befitting their wealth?
A migrants boat. Most of the people crossing the Med into Europe are economic migrants but in the past decade it has become known that claiming asylum on arrival (or at least if caught) is a good strategy so many do.
> Refugee immigrants are unable or unwilling to return home for fear or threat of prosecution, and thus, must make a life in the country that gives them refuge. Economic immigrants, on the other hand, are free from this constraint and can return home whenever they so desire.[1]
But then further clarification of the term 'economic migrant' is also interesting:
> The term ‘economic migrant’ has no legal definition. It is not mentioned in any international instruments of migration law.
and
> The inaccurate dichotomy between ‘economic migrants’ and refugees creates two fixed categories and gives the misleading impression that only refugees have and deserve legal protection and rights at the international level.
> Yet, the reality is different and far more complex. Migratory movements are composed of various types of migrants who may have specific protection needs, even if they are not fleeing persecution or a conflict. These include accompanied or unaccompanied migrant children; victims of human trafficking; migrants attempting to reunite with their families; and migrants affected by natural disasters or environmental degradation, including as a consequence of climate change. [2]
[1] https://docs.iza.org/dp1063.pdf [2] https://weblog.iom.int/false-dichotomy-between-economic-migr...
A 'refugee' has a legal definition because this is a status that is created and governed by international treaties, which is what makes it interesting for migrants because in 'nice' countries like in Europe this means that they are protected from deportation while their claim to refugee status is processed, which can take a very long time. They are provided accomodation during that time.
All other migrants are simply people who migrate for whatever reason people move to other countries, which are mainly family and economic reasons. When people from poor countries want to move to rich countries the main reason is very obviously economic. All those migrants fall into normal national laws of the countries they move to, in general this means that if they enter without visas they face a form of arrest and deportation.
That's it. There is indeed in a clear dichotomy. The rest is purely a political/ideological point of view as to whether people have effectively a right to migrate vs. whether countries have a right to decide who to let in.
While another refugee boat sunk is just that.
Might not be true in this case - the very idea of people locked up in a submarine is attention grabbing - but its certainly true for countless similar laments where people will point out the outsized attention a random investment banker getting attacked would get vis-a-vis the many murders in the inner city on any given day.
The Messenia disaster was over by the time it hit the news (and it was covered extensively in the UK press), whereas the Titan situation was ongoing. Watch how quickly it disappears from the news cycle now it's been resolved.
I just want to say, another issue is that to be perfectly honest, we don't like to humanize migrants, nor do we want to examine our culpability in their misfortune and demise. We want to mine resources from foreign countries even if that means destabilizing their governments, but we absolutely do not want to deal with the people fleeing those places whether we had nothing to do with their misfortune or we were in some way complicit.
The misfortune of a few rich guys is much easier for us to process than the avoidable death of hundreds, which was reportedly ultimately caused by the European Coast Guard who attempted to tow the vessel and in doing so supposedly caused it to sink. [1]
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/16/world/europe/greece-migra...
[1] What springs to mind: Dramatic search action well suited for live blog coverage; psychological impact of the idea of people stranded in a submarine for days; And of course the average person here is probably a lot closer to taking a holiday trip in a submersible than to taking a refugee boat across the Mediterranean.
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2023_Messenia_migrant_boat_dis...